I hope someday to write a long essay titled something like "The Extraordinary Douchebaggery of Joseph Epstein," in which I explore, at great length, well… the extraordinary douchebaggery of professional essayist and curmudgeon Joseph Epstein, who writes eloquent but boring and self-satisfied essays and books and who seems to be one of those people who stands for everything that I loathe and stands against everything that I love. His latest obscenity (at least that I’ve seen) is "The Kindergarchy," an essay in the Weekly Standard in which he inveighs against the child-centeredness of middle class American culture. He writes:
In America we are currently living in a Kindergarchy, under rule by children. People who are raising, or have recently raised, or have even been around children a fair amount in recent years will, I think, immediately sense what I have in mind. Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own. This is what I call Kindergarchy: dreary, boring, sadly misguided Kindergarchy.
My basic response is: Blah blah blah, fuck you, can’t you see, Joe, that it’s all just an elaborate rationalization of/defense against your anger at your own bad parents (their bad parenting is well documented in Epstein’s essay, though he seems to think that it was good parenting) and a defense of what I can only assume is your bad parenting.
But the thing that really gets to me, aside from the essay being an attack on the essence of the way that I’m currently living my life (i.e. oriented around my child), is that I worry that he’s right, or that some part of what he’s saying is right, which would mean not only that I’m wasting an enormous amount of emotional energy worrying about making a mistake in my parenting when really I should just be enjoying my life, parenting Jolie in a loving but unselfconscious way, and worrying a lot less, but that I may even be harming her in the process.
Parenting has landed me in a conundrum that I don’t expect ever to resolve. At the same time that I grow ever more convinced that I am, in some basic way, deeply suited to being a father, and exceptionally good at certain aspects of it, I also grow ever more convinced that there are a million ways that even a natural parent like me can screw his kid up. Human psychology is so complex and counterintuitive, and our culture is so complex and tortured, that I think it’s possible that, simply by making some bad choices (about sleeping, discipline, praise, safety, etc.), or failing to make some hard decisions, I could end up with a neurotic, unhappy daughter.
She’ll love me, and have many of my good qualities, because I’m so devoted to her, but she might end up really cool and moderately fucked up at the same time (like, for instance, me), and I may be able to look back on what I’m doing right now, as a parent, and conclude, with some degree of confidence, that had I done something differently, which it was in my power to do, then she’s be happier than she is.
Sucks.
